I know, this is a throwback, right? Talking about arguably one of Google’s best dead products. I still find it hard to believe that Stadia has been dead for over three years, going on four, but it was arguably some of the most fun I’ve had gaming. The problem is that it was probably right to disappear, given the current state of the market.
The idea that you could play high-end games on almost any device with little to no hardware and just an internet connection felt like witchcraft. Stadia was not a new or novel concept; OnLive had tried in the early 2010s, and Gaikai even earlier, albeit on a smaller scale. The problem was always that we didn’t have the infrastructure and internet connections to handle megabytes of data back and forth to our devices without massive latency, and that is a killer in games.
GeForce Now is the only similar product out there still pulling in paying customers. Sony and Microsoft have also jumped into game streaming for console games. There is a market for game streaming, so long as you have a good library of games, people can play.
For me, I had fun playing games in places I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. A wall-mounted TV with no space for my Xbox, a hotel room while traveling, right there on my phone while I’m in the garden. I think I experience lag 10-15 times while playing on 5G. Never once at home on a Gigabit connection – which is to be expected given the bandwidth power.
